TurboCharge Your Site: Setup Google PageSpeed Service To Make Your Site Load Faster

PageSpeed Service is a free service provided by google to the webmasters to help their sites perform better and load faster.

After submitting your site, it fetches the content of you site and rewrites your pages by applying best practices and serves them to your visitors via Google’s servers across the globe.And so when an user visits your site he opens it up from a server near to his location. Again, since the service rewrites your pages using best technologies, your site loads faster then before.

In simple words, Google will grab a duplicate copy of your site, they will optimize it and will save it in their server. When visitors will visit your site, the optimized and cached version will be seen by them.

Watch the Introduction Video to Google PageSpeed Service:

There are things you should know before using the service:

1. For using this service, only domains containing the “www” prefix are eligible. Naked domains such as “http://site.com” (without www) are not supported.

2. You need to be able to change your domain’s CNAME and Host record.

Take a test before using the service:

You can go to WebPageTest and test your site to see the benefits that you will get by using the service before using the service.

You can see that I can double the loading speed of my blog by using the service. I did use the service as well and loved the features. But since I’ve a non-www redirection and I don’t want to remove it for now so I stopped using the service as I don’t get full benefits due to redirection. But if you’ve a www.site.com type of domain then you can always use the service.

Steps to follow to use the Google PageSpeed Service:

1. Go to this page and enter your gmail address and site url to use the service.

2. Wait for an email from Google inviting you ti use the PageSpeed Service.

3. You will get an invitation with a link to Get Started. Click on it and get started.

4. You will be taken Google APIs page. If you’re asked to sign in then do it using the same email id you used at step 2.

5. On left pane you will see the PageSpeed Service option. Click on it.

6. Now you will be taken to a page where you will have to enter your site url for which you want to use the service.

7. If you would like to setup a site with SSL support then proceed and upload your certificates, otherwise carry on with regular setup.

8. After entering your site url you may have to verify your ownership. Just proceed and verify your site by any of the ways mentioned.

9. The best way to verify your site will be to upload the html file they provides to your hosting server.

10. After doing this, click on verify and take the ownership of your site.

11. Now the final step will be to setup your domain and set your CNAME record so that your site can be severed by Google’s PageSpeed Service.

Record: CNAME

Host: www

Points to: pagespeed.googlehosted.com

12. To change the CNAME: Steps are a bit different for different providers. But the thing is that you’ve to go to your host’s DNS manager and edit the CNAME www and enter pagespeed.googlehosted.com. If you don’t have such a CNAME then you’ve to create one record. While creating, enter the following information:

Host: Enter the prefix of your serving domain that you want to add the record for. For example, if your serving domain is www.example.com, enter just www here.

That points to: Enter pagespeed.googlehosted.com.

If you need some more help then here’s a set of instructions for specific domain providers.

13. After setting up the CNAME record refresh the PageSpeed Service page and your site will get a ready signal. Now you can take tests on how your site will perform now. That’s it.

Page loading speed matters to a large extent in case of business sites as it really affects the conversion rate if your site is very lazy to load. Of course it’s not recommend to use the service but you can use it if you think your site needs to get better with loading time so that it can provide a better user experience. I’ll suggest you to try it on a test site and see the changes and yeah, you’re getting all these for free. So give it a try. :)

38 Comments

I have been using the PageSpeed Apache module, which is similar to the PageSpeed service. The module caches your sites files almost the same way PageSpeed service does, but, it lacks the CDN benefits.

Load-time wise, the Page Speed score of my home page in Chrome went from 74 to 92 (out of 100) after enabling the module, so not bad! Pretty easy to install too if you have SiteGround, using their SuperCacher service.

I’ve used the service for a while and really liked it. But for now I’m ok with my blog’s speed without PSS and since my blog has a non www redirection so I don’t get full benefits. May be I’ll start using it again in future.

Yea its pretty bad if your site takes too much time to load as it does irritate to visitors. The Google page speed service is really good to speed up your site and this article really shows the step by step methods. thanksTanmoy Das recently posted…How To Read PDF File Using Google Play Book App

Hai Avi Jit,
Nice post. You have explained the main theme of this post through the video. I would like to try this in my site.Thank you for sharing this with us :)Bibin recently posted…How to create Picture Password in Windows 8

It’s really a nice post to increase website speed with the help of Google page speed service, very good explanation and tips… I will try it on my website… Thanks buddy for sharing this stuff with us.. Happy blogging.Himanshu recently posted…DreamHost Coupon Code – $97 WebHosting Discount January 2014

hey avi,
nice post. this will help me a lot.
i am using wordpress for my website. i want to ask that i have site without the www. so what should i do to use this serviceShyantan recently posted…Animated Google Doodle for Happy New Year 2014

Google pagespeed is actually works like a charm in case of page speed. But, thr are many guy with complaintas it takes large bandwidth in web hosting. Comparing with regular cdn. you have any similar kid of problem?
my few friends got thr accounts suspended after overuse of bandwidth after using google pagespeed…. but, traffic is not that much high.Arpan recently posted…How to Install WordPress Manually on any Web hosting

Hello Avi,
Indeed a great article. But I guess Cloud services provide better page speed as I am using one now for my sites and they shows significant results.
But as such I have never tried my hands on to try out Google’s service to I will for sure.
Thanks for this tutorial. :)Charmie recently posted…John Abraham got married to his girl-friend Priya Runchal

I was using Google Page Speed for a period of 2 months, didn’t see a improvement in Visits or in rankings. So removed it :) I don’t think Google is giving importance to sites running with Page Speed. What do you say?

Currently, I am using cloudfare on my site and working tremendously awesome. But then also after going through this article, I must try out Google Page Speed for one. So, is there any way to combine both the technology and use it on the same time?Sohil Memon recently posted…Best WhatsApp Messages Status for Valentines Day 2014 (Boys/Girls)

hello Avi Jit
great Article this Is here. Google launched Many services to Bloggers to Take Care of their Sites. Thanks for Sharing info about Page Speed Service also. going to Test Speed of my Web too :D

OK, this is a complete article on how to set up Google Pagespeed. But additionally we can take several other measures to make a website to load faster. If it is a customized website (non blog engines) then try to put your javascripts before the closing body() tags. Remember Javascript and HTML loads serially. Use GZip compression system to make your html, css and js files compressed and apart from these you can make your website distributed world wide using Content Delivery Network (CDN).
There are other steps as well, if you are good at coding and HTML then you know the power of less & structured coding, again this helps a lot in fast loading also use CSS sprite and image thumbnails to optimize your website images.
Lastly it is completely right that if you are a non tech person then Google Pagespeed is the best for you.Soumya Roy recently posted…5 Ways Small Businesses Can Use Digital Marketing to Attract New and Online Customers